Socrates

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Do what we can, summer will have its flies.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.